Page 127 of War

My own hand falls away from my throat, and I close my eyes against the feel of his fingertip.

“I’m sorry, wife,” the horseman says. “Your misfortune is my gain.”

My brows knit. That’s such an odd thing to say.

“What do you mean?” I ask, opening my eyes.

War’s lips brush my skin as he pulls me in close. “The day you received this scar is the day you became mine.”

Not all placeslook like they’ve been touched by the apocalypse.

There are the remote villages like the one we enter two days later that the modern world clearly swept past. These are the places where farmers still herd their livestock through the streets and the dogs are wild and the buildings use the same mudbrick architecture they have for the last thousand years.

These towns seem to have hardly felt the hit of the apocalypse, and they weathered it much more gracefully than my city did.

War and I enter the fishing village, which is hardly more than a few streets perched next to the Mediterranean Sea. As we pass through, a couple men sit outside of their homes, sipping Turkish coffee and smoking hand-rolled cigarettes.

I stare at them in wonder. War and I pass through many towns, but almost all of them have already been visited by death.

Not this village. The people here are enjoying this day just as they would any other.

“What are you going to do with them?” I ask, my question punctuated by theclopof my horse’s footfalls.

“What I always do, wife.”

My stomach clenches at that. Riding next to War is suddenly, distinctly uncomfortable.

We’re drawing eyes to us the farther into town we get. I realized who War was shortly after I first saw him; I wonder now, as people stare, whether they are having the same realization I once did.

Or it could simply be that these days, no one trusts strangers, particularly strangers with giant fucking swords strapped to their backs.

“You don’t have to kill them, you know,” I say under my breath. “You could just skip this place. Just for the hell of it.”

“My wife and her soft heart,” War says. It sounds like a genuine compliment. “Would you really like that? For me to spare these people?”

Is he being serious?

I take in his merciless features.

Yes, I think he might actually be.

“I would,” I say, barely daring to believe it.

War stares at me for several seconds, and I hold his gaze, ignoring our growing audience.

Eventually he makes a sound at the back of his throat and focuses on the road again.

I don’t know what to make of that.

My hands clench the reins. I’m so tense—so, so tense. I keep waiting for War to withdraw his sword, to tell me that it was all a clever trick, but he doesn’t.

We pass through the village, then leave it behind us altogether. Only then do I fully release my breath. It’s not until the village is entirely out of sight, however, that I speak.

“You didn’t kill them,” I say, disbelieving.

“No,” War agrees. “I didn’t. I have dead for that.”

Beneath our feet, the ground quakes. It takes about a minute, but eventually I hear screams start up at our backs, and now I know exactly what’s become of that village.